


They Won't

by Inconjunct



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, DirtyCoward!Chris, Gen, character exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-19
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-27 02:23:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5029999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inconjunct/pseuds/Inconjunct
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They'd always teased her about her relationship with Chris, or the lack thereof. She'd been waiting for the right time, and had been hoping it would be up at the lodge. She'd been hoping for snowflakes, fire, and hot cocoa. Unfortunately, things didn't go quite as she'd planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	They Won't

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

  
When Josh had invited her up to the lodge, she’d been thrilled. The prospect of remembering the awful incident from the year before didn’t sound too fun, but getting to see all of her old friends and maybe move past what had happened was a very appealing prospect. Plus, she knew that Chris would be there to back Josh up, and she’d been waiting for the right time.

  
Jess and Emily had both teased her about waiting for the perfect moment. Together, when they’d still been friends and then separately after Mike drove a wedge between them.

  
She could hear Emily in her head. She’d been characteristically blunt: “Boys are idiots, Ashley. They think they want to be in charge, but if you leave it up to them nothing will ever happen. Find Chris, tell him how you feel, and get this show on the road, already. This will they or won’t they crap is so over.”

  
While Jess came from a different perspective, she’d come to the same conclusion: “He obviously likes you. I’ve seen how he looks at you, even when there are plenty of other girls around. Make the first move, then let him make the next three. See what happens.”

  
She’d come up to the lodge planning to do just that — or at least to give him ample opportunity to finally spit it out. In her fantasies, the lodge was all cozy fires and hot cocoa, a little snow fall, Chris with a little bit of snow in his spiked up hair leaning in to kiss her. It’d be her first kiss, but she’d imagined it often enough that it felt well-trodden.

  
Unfortunately, Josh had other plans in mind.

 

She hadn’t meant to. It all — it all happened too fast. Her brain had been fried at eleven o’clock and then things had gone downhill from there. There had been the saw trap, seeing Josh’s dead body, but of course he wasn’t _really_ dead but she’d thought he was dead, that Chris had murdered his best friend to let her live.

  
It went from bad to worse: chased by the pyscho, stabbing him with a pair of scissors, waking up tied to another saw trap. Then Chris, almost without prompting, picked up the gun, aimed it at her, and pulled the trigger. Her mind tried to find an explanation for why he’d do this. He wasn’t supposed to be vicious or cruel. He was supposed to be kind, and gentle, and — he’d still tried to kill her, with no hesitation. He’d broken down crying after, and apologized. Said he was glad she was safe.

  
All she could see was him raising a gun in her face, again and again. She found herself in the peculiar position of comforting her would-be killer as he promised he’d never let harm come to her, a promise he’d already violated.

  
She tried to tell herself that it was faked, that it was pretend. It had all _felt_ real, though. Josh had played his sick game really well, too well for there to be any real emotional distance between the narrative he’d constructed and reality. If she were someone else, she supposed, she’d be mad at Josh. Emily, perhaps, would be able to redirect all of these roiling emotions and put them squarely on the shoulders of the person who’d put them in this position. After all, he’d deliberately put she and Chris through hell.

  
Josh had always had a mean streak, though. Before tonight, the exclusive recipients of his wrath had been people who messed with his sisters. In his mind, maybe that was still the case. Try as she might, she just couldn’t even begin to understand his motivations.

  
With Chris, it was just… if he’d only hesitated, even for a moment. If he’d just said he didn’t want them both to die and shot at the last second as the saw was right above them both, perhaps that would have been better. He hadn’t.

  
When he’d left the lodge he had looked to her, for what she didn’t know. Reassurance? Benediction? Absolution? She just stared back. He’d already taken her life. She had nothing more to offer.

  
She didn’t know how much time had passed as she stood by the door, still covered in pig’s blood. Part of her felt like she should do something. Wash it off with a warm rag, perhaps. The rest of her didn’t see the point. She was stained. Stained by what Josh had done, stained by what Chris had done. The most important person to her in the whole world had just tried to kill her. What did a little blood matter?

  
As he sprinted to the door, her eyes locked on the monster — the wendigo, the old man had said — not too far from him. He was holding a shotgun, and the wendigo became a circular saw descending from the ceiling, and this whole situation was starting to feel too familiar.

  
He was pounding on the door now. He was saying something but it sounded like he was under water, a hundred miles away, in outer space. Maybe she was the one who was in outer space. Her whole body felt light, like she was floating.

  
It couldn’t have been more than fifteen seconds later and it was done. Chris’ head was in one location and his body in another.  

  
Mike snapped her back to reality, saying something about a basement.

  
She blinked at him, his dynamism and verve. “It was too late.” Her own voice sounded soft and far away. Wrapped in cotton and muffled by snow.

  
As Mike led her to the basement, she looked back at the porch. Just a little blood.

**Author's Note:**

> I adore Chris as a character, which probably isn't clear from this story. I just wanted to do a little exploration of what could have been going through Ashley's head as she backed away from the door. Despite the name of the trophy being "Fatal Grudge," the emotions in play both at the time and after the game (if Ashley survives) seem more complex than simple tit-for-tat revenge. Thanks for reading!


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